What Are Boson & Hadron Particles?

By Walter Unglaub

Bosons are a type of particle that we find in nature that obey a certain type of statistics. Find out about boson and hadron particles with help from an experienced physics professional in this free video clip.

Transcript

Hello, my name is Walter Unglaub and this is what are boson and hadron particles. Bosons are a type of particle that we find in nature that obey a certain type of statistics. These statistics are called Bose Einstein statistics. And the distribution function for the number of bosons you'd find of a given energy E is given by this function of the energy which is equal to one over e the natural number raised to the energy Ei minus the chemical potential divided by kbT where kb is the Boseman constant and T is the temperature. So we have e to the energy divided by kbT minus one. Now what's interesting about bosons is that they can be either elementary particles such as photons or gluons where photons are the mediating particle for the electromagnetic force and gluons are the equivalent for the strong nuclear force or we can have composite particles that are not elementary like these particles. So an example would be the nucleus of carbon 12. So these types of particles that obey these statistics have what we call integer values of spin. So the spin is an inherently quantum mechanical property of these particles and if it's an integer number than it obeys these types of statistics. The other type of particle found in nature are fermeons which have half integer spin. And therefore they have anti symmetric wave functions which quantum mechanically repel. So they can not exist in the same space at the same time unlike bosons that have the same energy. Hadrons on the other hand are inherently composite quantum particles. So as an example we have protons or neutrons. And generally hadrons come in two types of flavors in the universe. We have baryons which are composite particles made up of three quarks where a quark is an elementary nuclear particle or we find in the lab mesons which are these composite particles made up of two quarks. So an example of a baryon is a proton. And also neutron. Protons and neutrons are the most common types of baryons found in nature. There are other hypothetical hadrons that might be found in nature one day. They might have say four or even five quarks. But we have yet to find evidence of them. My name is Walter Unglaub and this is what are boson and hadron particles.